The Mohammad Atta Story (gets curiorsor and curiorsor)

[Missouri Mule]

Watch this story very closely. It has legs. More political correctness in action. The left should be proud.
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Atta way to blow 9/11 panel's credibility

August 14, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

If you want to know everything wrong with the 9/11 Commission in a single sound bite, consider this from Al Felzenberg, its official spokesman, speaking Wednesday:

''There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report. This information was not meshing with the other information that we had.''

In fairness to Felzenberg, he was having a bad week, and a hard time staying on top of the commission's ever-shifting version of events. It emerged that the U.S. military had fingered Mohammed Atta -- the guy who plowed Flight 11 into the first World Trade Center tower -- well over a year before before 9/11. Or as the Associated Press puts it:

"A classified military intelligence unit called 'Able Danger' identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City."...

(Snip)

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn14.html

 

[Diogenes]

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. On the one hand, I have no idea how specific this new evidence might be (although I doubt that Curt Weldon would make a fuss about nothing). On the other hand, I remain convinced that Jamie Gorelick was on the wrong side of the table during the commission hearings, and that throws all the commission conclusions into question.

 

[Missouri Mule]

Well, it could get REALLY, REALLY interesting if this thing actually turns up the fact that Atta really did meet with an Iraqi agent In Prague that the Commission report discounted. I was reading a report today that had a very interesting comment. The writer claimed to know that Condi Rice still adhered to this belief. Now that might not mean much to someone who believes that Bush invaded an "innocent country" and that Saddam was after all just an average tyrant in the Middle East. But if he actually was somehow involved in 9/11, there are going to be a whole lot of people with a lot of egg on their face. I don't know whether to put any stock in this story but I've never seen any definitive proof one way or another regarding Atta's involvement with Iraqi intelligence but then again I'm not privy to the most innermost highly secrets that Bush and his administration are working from.

If Atta truly was in this country prior to the time he was placed here; such as in Florida almost applying to buy a crop duster (as now appears to be true) then it throws into doubt almost all of the report. To have allowed a known associate of bin Laden to move about the country as we did and and with the assertions that Sandy Berger may have been helping himself to secrets that showed the culpability of the Clinton administration invites all kinds of juicy scenarios; not the least of which is a viable Hillary Clinton presidency run. Is anyone going to trust a Democractic presidential candidate if it is widely believed that the previous Democratic administration allowed such goings on? Inquiring minds want to know. Methinks we may have this answer prior to the 2008 elections.

 

[Stinger]

Watch this story very closely. It has legs. More political correctness in action. The left should be proud.

Jamie Gorelick, just watch.

 

[Missouri Mule]

Jamie Gorelick, just watch.

I'm trying to keep an open mind on this story. I'm not wanting to dump on Gorelick. She is an easy target and may very well be blamed when all is said and done but the ones to blame are the Clinton administration and specifically look at Sandy Berger. I wouldn't trust him any further than I could throw him. Clinton was being advised by Berger on international affairs as his national security advisor. He is known to have secreted away almost certainly damaging documents to the Clinton administration. What was in those documents? Clinton could have fired Gorelick anytime he wanted to and he should certainly have fired Reno long before his term ended. She is probably the most imcompetent attorney general in American history. And the great irony is that "political correctness" led to her appointment. She wasn't even liked by Clinton but the first two candidates (two other women) had "nannie" problems so they didn't make the cut. Reno was the default choice and as we know later ran interference for Clinton when his scandals emerged. So Gorelick isn't the problem. She is just another government bureaucrat who interpreted the laws. Reno signed off and we had 9/11 as a result. This was to satisfy the "civil rights" advocates that had this big deal going about racial profiling and a lot of other liberal junk that passes for politics in Washington, D.C. P.C. is almost certainly the reason 3,000 Americans died on 9/11.

 

[Missouri Mule]

I've been looking further into this story and Weldon's story seems to have some problems but the story is by no means over. Check out this link.

DID THE BERGEN RECORD BREAK SOMETHING HERE?

Mike Kelly, a columnist for the Bergen Record of New Jersey, had Curt Weldon’s staff arrange an interview with a member of Able Danger.

He uncovers a few tidbits we haven't heard before:

For a year before the 9/11 attacks, the Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the hijacking plot that killed almost 3,000 people...

A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. "But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI."

The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn. That's how close all this was - to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops.

The story begins a year before the attacks. A top-secret team of Pentagon military counter-terror computer sleuths, who worked for a special operations commando group, was well into a project to monitor al-Qaida operations.

The 11-person group called itself "Project Able Danger." Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.

The technique is called "data mining." The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records.

From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names - Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

All four turned out to be hijackers. Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.

What is interesting about this information now is that a CIA team, working separately from the Able Danger Team, had set its sights on al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The two were already on a CIA terror watch list and still had managed to obtain U.S. visas.

The CIA feared al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi might try to slip into the United States. But the CIA lost track of them after they left a terror meeting in Malaysia in early 2000 for Bangkok. Worse, the CIA waited until the summer of 2001 to tell the FBI that two suspected terrorists had visas to enter the United States - and might be here…

By mid-2000, the Able Danger team knew it had important information about a possible terrorist plot. Because of a peculiar series of computer links that went through Brooklyn, the team began referring to the four future hijackers as the "Brooklyn cell." Their movements and communications were raising too many suspicions.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle at the end:

Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?

When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: "Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?"

(Snip)

http://tks.nationalreview.com/archives/072966.asp

 

[Missouri Mule]

The Clinton administration regarding terrorism. Ever wonder why 9/11 happened? Wonder no more.

From today's CNN transcript report on Wolf Blitzer to former Secretary of Defence William Cohen. Briefly stated --

"I know nothing."

BLITZER: Did you know about this unit called Able Danger, these special operations forces that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, had created?

COHEN: I'm not -- I don't have a recollection specifically of that.

I certainly know that there were a number of special forces that were set up to gather information. I don't recall receiving that particular report, though.

BLITZER: But you do recall that there were prohibitions on the U.S. military informing the FBI of potential threats out there? Because that sounds pretty outrageous to the average person out there.

COHEN: I'm not sure there was a prohibition against that. All I'm saying -- there were a number of prohibitions in terms of what information the CIA could share with the FBI and the FBI with the CIA, what the Pentagon could do, what our military could do in terms of enforcing or using military forces to protect the country domestically.

All that has been changed now by 9/11, but prior to that there were a number of restrictions. This may have been one of them. I'm not familiar with it.


http://www.strangepolitics.com/images/content/101482.jpg

 

[AlbqOwl]

Just listening around the edges on television magazines and talk radio, there is growing suspicion that the 9/11 Commission Report was compromised, if not intentionally altered, to protect Jamie Gorelick, a popular one of their own. This was brought up of course when the Commission was in session when several GOPers thought Gorelick should step down then, but the Commission members defended her professionalism and objectivity. All this new information coming out now makes all that look even more suspect.

Also, the questions are surfacing again about what classified information Sandy Berger stuffed into his pants and socks and smuggled out of the archives just before his (and Clinton's) testimony before the Commission. He got no more than a fine and a slap on the wrist for that with zero cries of outrage from the Democrats.

As you said Mule....curiouser and curiouser.

 

[AlbqOwl]

 

[Diogenes]

I'm trying to keep an open mind on this story. I'm not wanting to dump on Gorelick. She is an easy target and may very well be blamed when all is said and done but the ones to blame are the Clinton administration and specifically look at Sandy Berger.

I suspect that when the dust settles, we will find that Jamie Gorelick extended the wall to protect the public from the knowledge that the Chinese were financing Clinton's 1996 reelection bid, and the success of the 9/11 attacks was an unintended consequence of that (and many other) extremely poor decisions of the X-rated administration. All of which is an extremely sorry commentary on the willingness of some members of the liberal establishment to sacrifice national security for the sake of temporary power.

The Democrats of today are not the Roosevelts and Trumans of my father's day.

 

[cnredd]

Liberal's reation to this thread so far...(sound of chirping crickets)

I bet they're thinking, "Wait until we find out the whole story...Just like we've done with Rove.":2rofll:

 

[Missouri Mule]

There you have it. 9/11 was no intelligence failure; it was a bureaucratic failure.

Bureaucracy and political correctness ran wild during the Clinton adminstration. While he was getting serviced in the anti-room of the WH, critical information about what would become known as "9/11" was buried by bureaucracy fostered by his inept administration. From the NYT; commonly known as the "newspaper of record."

As most real Americans know, the left cannot be entrusted with our national security. This proves it in spades. BTW: This is also another example of dare I say it 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS." See below.

Bottom line: Mohammad Atta's rights" (the ringleader of 9/11) were more important the lives of 3,000 innocent Americans. That's Political Correctness in action. The work of the devil and the brainchild of the far left.
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Officer Says Pentagon Barred Sharing Pre-9/11 Qaeda Data With F.B.I.


By PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 16, 2005

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly. The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the F.B.I.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.'s Washington field office to share the information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 plot was still being planned.

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. "It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said...

(snip)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/p...&en=0a9cf97378831bba&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 

[AlbqOwl]

That's my number one problem with the radical left: for them just about everything takes precedence over expediency and practicality these days. It's usually just a major irritant, but when it gives license to thugs and hoodlums to take an innocent life, let alone thousands of lives, it becomes criminal in my mind. I wonder at what point this country abandoned plain old common sense?

 

[Missouri Mule]

That's my number one problem with the radical left: for them just about everything takes precedence over expediency and practicality these days. It's usually just a major irritant, but when it gives license to thugs and hoodlums to take an innocent life, let alone thousands of lives, it becomes criminal in my mind. I wonder at what point this country abandoned plain old common sense?

I can tell you exactly when. It was right about the time the "Woodstock Generation" became the "establishment"; otherwise known as the "do it if feels good" and "let it all hang out" generation. I went to college when the war effort against the Vietnam War really began rolling. Such groups as the Students for Democratic Action and other left-wing groups started getting their footing. Many of these "leaders" went on to become the leaders of today and they put their left-wing ideology into effect that ultimately culminated in the needless 9/11 mass murder.

When I grew up in the 1950s it was UNTHINKABLE to trash the United States and our leaders as the left does today. Real Americans were in the majority in those days. A few left-wing nuts were always out there but not running the mainstream media and giving the news on television. Most people came out of WWII when patriotism was not a bad word. Today's spoiled bunch of brats never knew that we could very well have lost that war and we would today be speaking German and Japanese.

 

[Missouri Mule]

And now I am just getting as mad as hell

Read on what the leftist ideologues allowed to happen to this country on 9/11.
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By DEBORAH ORIN

NY Post

August 17, 2005 -- PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.

Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.

Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading — because White's team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.

"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.

"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."

She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."

White must have felt like Cassandra, foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton's Justice Department would listen. Team Clinton put up the "wall" in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9/11 attacks.

Questions about the "wall" recently arose in regard to possible warnings from Able Danger, a pre-9/11 military-intelligence program, but the White memo makes clear that the issue was far, far broader.

In theory, the "wall" was supposed to avoid legal challenges to terror prosecutions. The problem was, as White and her team noted, only prosecutors familiar with a case or a cast of terror players might see the connections that could led to nabbing a suspect or foiling a plot.

Justice honchos overruled White's plea — even though her team knew better than anyone else in law enforcement what the real risks were. White's team won a host of convictions — including Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who plotted to bomb landmarks like the Statue of Liberty.

Equally troubling is that the 9/11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9/11, got White's stunning memo and several related documents — and deep-sixed all of them.

The commission's report skips lightly over the wall in three brief pages (out of 567). It makes no mention at all of White's passionate and prescient warnings. Yet warnings that went ignored are just what the commission was supposed to examine.

So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White's memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick. (White has declined to discuss the matter, and Gorelick didn't immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.)

White wrote the memo after her earlier pleas against the "wall" were rejected. She enlisted the help of her "Bomb II Team" — prosecutors working on terror bombings like the 1993 Twin Towers attack.

They gave six pages of detailed reasons why it was a mistake to create too much of a wall between intelligence and prosecutions. White forwarded that analysis to Gorelick and added her own notes on the Clinton-era decision "to keep prosecutors in the dark about intelligence investigations."" ...

"What troubles me even more than the known problems we have encountered are the undoubtedly countless instances of unshared and unacted-upon information that reside in some file or other or in some head or other or in some unreviewed or not fully understood tape or other," White wrote. "These can be disasters waiting to happen.

(Snip)

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/51981.htm